In the interests of accountability for the stuff I write here’s a look at the plans I made at the start of 2017 and how things worked out.
My post from last year : Goals for 2017
mentioned 4 things I was aiming for:
Editorial calendar – create and stick to an editorial calendar to help keep content regular: This started out well but petered out further into the year and with it went the regular content. Its surprising how only having a 2-3 word description of the type of article I needed to write encouraged me to actually write it. knowing the schedule allowed me to write the posts in non-chronological order which meant at some points I had written 4-5 articles in advance that were waiting for be published. The system worked well until I missed the first deadline. After that discipline was gone my post frequency dropped massively. The calendar itself was just a colour coded excel sheet noting the category of article and a brief description I wanted to write set out for the whole year, the effort required to create it was tiny compared to the extra productivity it created.
Matched Betting – Try to make matched betting a consistent source of income: I gave this a good go, signed up to a matched betting service and probably tried to claim somewhere in the region of 150-200 offers, the Bingo offers and initial sign up bonuses were very simple and straight forward but once those ran out it seems the return on your time drops massively. The main reason I stopped doing these was the organisation and time required to keep on top of everything. If you’re super neat and spend 6-8 hours with this every day then you can make a living from it, for me however I value my time more. I don’t want to earn money in ways that resemble a second job.
Pintrest – I attempted this and built a few useful (at least I thought so) info-graphics but got nothing back from it. Maybe I didn’t give it enough time and you need to keep cracking images out until things start snowballing? This is definitely one to take another look at at some later stage.
Guest Post – Have some content published on another site: The goal was to get 5 posts hosted by others. I managed one and whilst it wasn’t a massive success in terms of driving traffic back to this site I did enjoy writing it. Having this blog is more about doing something creative and learning more about finance myself as oppose to getting hits/views.
Overall I had a fun year with the blog, even if at times I was more active on twitter than here. As long as I’m having fun I’m going to keep cracking on with it. Happy new year everyone!
Money Corgi 